Headlamp

For a decade the answer to "is there a web UI?" was the Kubernetes Dashboard 15,415 , a SIG UI project. Version 7 dropped manifest installs for a Helm 29,435 chart of several containers behind a Kong gateway, and contributors thinned out; its last chart release was 7.14.0 on 30 October 2025. On 5 January 2026 the maintainers added an archival notice to the README, and GitHub 29 shows the repository "archived by the owner on Jan 21, 2026". The API tells the rest:

for r in kubernetes/dashboard kubernetes-sigs/headlamp; do
  curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/$r |
    jq -r '[.full_name, .archived, .pushed_at[:10], .license.spdx_id] | @tsv' | tr '\t' ' '
done

kubernetes-retired/dashboard true 2026-01-21 Apache-2.0
kubernetes-sigs/headlamp false 2026-09-24 Apache-2.0

The Dashboard now lives under kubernetes-retired: GitHub redirected the old name, and archived is true. Its README says the project is "no longer maintained due to lack of active maintainers and contributors" and points to Headlamp (github.com/kubernetes-sigs/headlamp (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/headlamp 7,343 ), Apache-2.0), and the Dashboard page on kubernetes.io now opens with "Kubernetes Dashboard is deprecated and unmaintained" and the same advice. Headlamp, begun in the headlamp-k8s organization and since moved under SIG UI and kubernetes-sigs, is at 0.45.0 (20 August 2026). It runs in the cluster as a Deployment serving a web UI, or on your machine as a desktop app with your kubeconfig, and its plugins add views for Argo CD 126 , Flux 213,041 , Prometheus 16,091 and more.

Two design choices matter for BookNest. Headlamp talks to the API with the user's own token (or OIDC), not with a powerful service account of its own, and it hides the buttons for actions RBAC would refuse. Existing Dashboard installs keep running, but receive no security fixes; replace them rather than exposing them.